June 14, 2013

Happy Friday! Here's our week in kid plates. We're getting ready to move from Florida to New York at the end of the month, so great upheavals are taking place in our home and in our thoughts. I'm been starting to plan ahead some road-eats, stockpiling (maybe overzealously) frozen trail mix bars and muffins. We'll have a cooler and I'll probably pack a few baked sweet potatoes, sandwiches, and some frozen lentil stew. I'm not sure how my attempts to feed a toddler healthy food on the road for three days will pan out, but I plan to document them here (you can expect less glamorous backgrounds than my lovely hardwood floors, like the console of our Toyota.) In the meantime, enjoy these ordinary eats.

Wait, hot dogs?? We tried the Applegate brand of all-beef hot dogs, which are nitrate-free, antibiotic-free, uncured, and made from from humanely-raised cows. Aside from being a little salty, they were a tasty and reasonably nutritious treat to accompany a veggie-rich meal.

Darwin and I often share a piece of fruit with our lunch. On this day he looked at my plate and said, "Mama's nectarines are big."
"Yes," I replied, "I cut yours into small pieces because you have a small mouth."
"Mama's got a big mouth."
I walked right into that. RIGHT into it.

Homemade refried beans are fun and easy to make. I sauteed an onion and a minced jalapeno pepper until soft, then added Mexican spices and a pound of pressure-cooked pinto beans, mashing the beans right in the pot.

green grapes; spinach, carrot and brown rice stew

This stew comes from Mark Bittman and the New York Times. I got swept away by the mysterious romance of his description of eating it "at a Turkish lunch counter" and felt compelled to make it. The recipe uses a whole pound of spinach, half a pound of carrots, and 3/4 cup of brown basmati rice simmered in homemade chicken broth until it is, as he puts it, "cooked to death." I usually favor brisk, lightly-cooked vegetables, so I was very curious. It was delicious! Because the veggies are so tender, this would be a great stew to serve a baby who's still learning how to eat solids.

June 7, 2013

Hi, friends and foodies! Here's a long photo-post of this week's simple kid plates. It seems I can only manage to post once a week for the time being, and recipe posts have been slow out of the gate. For those of you who share my strange curiosity and appreciation for these simple visuals of children's food, I hope you'll continue to visit. I'm not going anywhere.

We've had some severe storms lately, so a lot of the food appears under this weird, gothic lighting on my porch.

We enjoyed this slaw so much, I made it twice in a week. The vinaigrette dressing is the same as this one. The cabbage is half purple and half green, and the only other ingredients are thinly sliced onions and unmeasured handfuls of raisins and cilantro. Love those purple-pigment antioxidants!

OK, big breakthrough! I've been making fewer batches of my oat breakfast cookies, lately, because one batch doesn't feed the three of us for very many breakfasts. Last night I tried scaling them up with some modifications (added yogurt and changed some ratios--ask me for the recipe), and baking them in muffin tins. Totally great! They puffed up perfectly, stayed moist and sweet, and now they're in useful serving sizes in my freezer.